Social Perception
Psychological Biases
đź‘Ą Social Perception
20 biases in this category
Biases that affect how we perceive, judge, and interact with other people.
Implicit Bias
Unconscious attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions without our awareness or intentional control.
Attribution Bias (Social)
Systematic errors in explaining the causes of others' behavior, typically overweighting personality and underweighting situation.
Beauty Bias
The tendency to associate physical attractiveness with positive traits—assuming attractive people are smarter, more competent, more successful, and more moral.
Projection Bias (Social)
The tendency to unconsciously assume that others share one's current emotional states, beliefs, or values, projecting one's own mental states onto others.
Stereotyping
The cognitive shortcut of applying generalized beliefs about a group to individual members of that group, regardless of individual characteristics.
Horn Effect
The opposite of the halo effect—the tendency for a negative impression in one area to influence opinions in other areas.
Negativity Bias (Social)
The tendency to give more weight to negative information than positive information in forming impressions of others.
Correspondence Bias
The tendency to draw inferences about a person's disposition from behavior that can be entirely explained by the situation—a form of the fundamental attribution error.
Trait Ascription Bias
The tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
Positivity Bias (Social)
The tendency to evaluate individuals more positively than groups and to focus on positive information in initial impression formation—a preference for positive person perception.
Assumed Similarity Bias
The tendency to assume that others are more similar to oneself than they actually are—projecting one's own characteristics onto others.
Illusory Correlation
The perception of a relationship between two variables when no such relationship exists, or perceiving a relationship as stronger than it actually is.
Expectation Effect
The tendency for expectations to influence perception and behavior in ways that confirm the expectation—what we expect to see, we tend to see.
Pygmalion Effect
The phenomenon where higher expectations lead to an increase in performance—a specific type of expectation effect named after Rosenthal's famous experiment in education.
Social Desirability Bias
The tendency to respond to questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others, over-reporting "good" behavior and under-reporting "bad" behavior in self-reports.
Extrinsic Incentive Bias
The tendency to believe that others are more motivated by external rewards (money, status) than they actually are, while believing oneself to be more motivated by intrinsic factors.
Self-Presentation Bias
The tendency to present oneself in a favorable light, managing impressions to create desired social images—affecting both what we say and how we perceive ourselves.
Ultimate Attribution Error (Social)
The tendency to make internal attributions for in-group successes and external attributions for in-group failures, while doing the opposite for out-groups.
Outgroup Homogeneity Effect
The perception that members of out-groups are more similar to each other than are members of one's own group—"they" are all alike while "we" are diverse.
Ingroup Homogeneity Effect
In some contexts, the opposite of outgroup homogeneity—perceiving one's in-group as more similar than out-groups, especially for groups that are small, distinctive, or identity-central.